And there’s the rub, I think.

The Bush administration are fantastic campaigners – they know how to get their core vote out, they know how to make it look like they have the interests of the heartlands at heart even when their policies say otherwise. In the 2000 primary against McCain, in the far-more-tightly-contested-than-anyone-expected 2000 general election, in the 2002 midterms and in 2004 they surprised people with just how well they and their supporters did. These guys know how to play the politics of a situation to their advantage, and the Democrats have consistently lost out as they’ve underestimated this ability.

The problem is… politics is not the same as policy. And things that win you votes aren’t always going to achieve your policy aims. So while they may have sold the invasion of Iraq to the American people, at least for a while, they failed miserably to sell it to the Iraqis, who were the ones that really mattered. And while lines about “cheese eating surrender monkeys” may have played well in Miami-Dade, they also pissed off people that the Bush administration would need to actually make middle eastern democracy work.

In 2004 a lot of John Kerry’s policy pronouncements, particularly relating to Iraq and the war on terror, suggested that he wouldn’t be that different from Bush in his aims. But I think he would have been very different in his methods – and a more consensual style could have worked wonders in actually achieving those aims.